This haunting novel is beautifully written and artfully narrated by Annabel Baldwin and Robyn Holdaway. Leah, a marine biologist, returns from a submarine research mission that trapped her at the bottom of the ocean for six months. When she returns, her wife, Miri, is frustrated by inexplicable changes in Leah. In alternating chapters, Holdaway captures Leah's pre-mission excitement and her post-mission distraction, especially her seeming otherworldliness. In brooding, thoughtful tones, Baldwin precisely reflects Miri's heartache, isolation, and distress. She captures Miri's anguish and shock as Leah undergoes mysterious, horrific transformations. Thanks to fine performances, Leah's diary entries, Miri's flashbacks, and the unimaginable mystery of the deep ocean all seem real. Listeners won't want to miss this genre-bending love story.
Pub Date: July 12, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781666583403
Publisher: Dreamscape
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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